Wagner puts smiley face on her famous frown

And the woman who made it, Ashley Wagner, is laughing right along with the reaction to her reaction after seeing the judges’ scores for her performance in the team event short program eight days ago.

“I think it’s absolutely hilarious, to be honest,” Wagner said Saturday, after returning to Sochi from several days training in Austria. “I have gotten a mixed bag of reaction, but at the end of the day, I’m the kind of person where what you see is what you get.”

Wagner’s frowning look of disgust and dismay has become fodder for the Internet and all forms of social (and anti-social) media – especially because the two-time U.S. champion had been photographed smiling broadly a split-second earlier.

“The fact it went viral is probably one of the most awesome things that has happened to me,” Wagner said. “I like to take it lightly because it’s one of those silly moments that got caught on camera."

When that honest reaction was captured, Wagner was looking at the scoreboard on the Iceberg Skating Palace's big screen, which did not show the clearly detailed reasons – jumps under-rotated and landed on two feet - for why her score was lower than she expected.

Now that she has studied them, Wagner and her coach, Rafael Arutunian, have found a way to get higher marks.

“Raf and I are trying out this new technique where you land jumps on one foot,” she said.

This is not the first time Wagner has been captured in a McKayla Maroney moment. It also happened when she saw that the free skate results at the 2010 U.S. Championships meant she would not make that Olympic team.

“I am a very open person,” Wagner said in a Tribune interview two months ago. “I would much rather say it how it is and how I feel than dance around the facts.”